Eston Nab, North Yorkshire: ‘According to some in the south, the massive wealth, investment and opportunity gap between London and the rest of the country isn’t an injustice that needs fixing – people living in leave-voting areas are ingrates who should be happy to receive scraps.’
Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

What if the leave camp actually had a point? Not about quitting the EU, I hasten to add. Though I believe reform is urgently necessary, I’m still convinced we’re better off in than out. Nor about the downsides of freedom of movement (wage depression in some industries and increased competition for housing and public services), all of which government policy could counteract, and tax revenues from migrant workers would help fund. Certainly, not about £350m-a-week for the NHS or our ability to leave the EU without any sort of economic hit.

But that stuff about smug, out-of-touch metropolitan elites? I can’t help but wonder if there was something in that. It’s easy to scoff when the line is trotted out by MPs, peers and billionaire business magnates, but they’re not really the point. That’s just one faction of the ruling class cynically managing to marshal anti-elite sentiment against those on the other side of the argument. The interesting question is why the accusation landed with the public.

Was this sweeping, insulting generalisation intended to parody attacks on migrant workers? Apparently not. According to this view the massive wealth, investment and opportunity gap between London and the rest of the country isn’t an injustice that needs fixing – rather, people living in leave-voting areas are ingrates who should be happy just to receive “our” scraps. (Where non-London remain voters are supposed to fit into this analysis isn’t clear, maybe they’re the grateful peasants who should be held as an example to the rebels.)

The same attitude was apparent in tongue-in-cheek campaigns to make London an independent city-state post-referendum. It’s hard to avoid concluding that some of my fellow remainers really do hold vast swaths of the country in contempt. The way this affluent, metropolitan minority frames the debate totally erases the millions of remain voters living in majority leave areas.

My home city of Sheffield voted to leave the EU, but only by a narrow margin of 52 to 48. Nonetheless, when I chat to other youngish, London-based professionals it seems that some have written off everyone north of Watford and south of Dumfries as stupid, racist and irredeemable. A similar thing is happening in the US, where individuals who identify as left-of-centre are actively celebrating Appalachian miners losing health insurance on the assumption that most of them voted for Trump, and were oblivious to the effect it would have on their medical cover.

It would be wilfully ignorant to deny that race and xenophobia were factors in the referendum. Some pro-Brexit newspapers and campaigners deployed dog whistles so obvious they were impossible to ignore – billboards showing queues of mainly non-white bodies and front pages warning that “12m Turks say they’ll come to the UK”.

After the result, there was a spike in hate crime and bigots seemed emboldened by their victory. Still, any attempt to pin the result on a single motivation is frustrated by the fact that a third of BAME voters opted to leave. Research suggests that 29% of people who think multiculturalism is good for the UK voted for Brexit, and 21% of people who describe themselves as actively pro-immigration did the same. In conversations with leave voters, I’ve found that the cost of EU membership, unnecessary regulations and lack of democratic accountability are cited almost as often as immigration as primary concerns.

And what of those people who do want to reduce immigration? In some circles, it’s become standard to dismiss “legitimate concerns” as nothing more than veiled bigotry. However, many of the problems frequently blamed on migration are very real. Public services genuinely are overstretched. Housing supply really is insufficient, and rent in some areas is unaffordable. People truly have seen their wages stagnate or fall and their terms of employment become more insecure. Training for UK workers in industries such as construction actually is inferior.

It’s one thing to argue that real solutions to these issues don’t involve limiting freedom of movement, it’s another to suggest that they don’t need solving at all. The rightwing media has pumped out a steady supply of misinformation blaming all this on immigration for decades, while painting Brexit as the solution to all these ills. If the left failed to effectively counter that, is it fair to attack voters for the opinions they now hold?

The last Labour government failed to protect the material interests of many working people in a changing economy. When the Tories took over following the financial crash, it was inevitable they’d take the situation from bad to worse. Given the rapid expansion of EU immigration in the same period, it’s hardly surprising that a simple narrative emerged to fill the vacuum. Illiberal elites might have taken the opportunity to push their own toxic agenda, but it’s the failure of the liberal left that made that possible.

Instead of learning from this failure, many privileged remainers are simply doubling down on their ignorance. If you write off more than half of the population and wish further hardship on regions that are already struggling, why should those people listen to a word you say? And if you’re willing to restrict redistributive policies to those who agree with your political views then you’re no better than the Tories who offer tax cuts to their millionaire friends while slashing public services to the bone in Labour local authorities. If progressive politics is to take hold in the public imagination again it will not be by writing off vast swaths of the electorate as irredeemable bigots who deserve whatever hardships a Conservative government heaps upon them – it will be by offering positive, leftwing solutions to people’s very real worries.